Tank Day 28: First Person View

On previous days, I’ve shown plenty of videos of the tank shot using a camera, but so far I haven’t shown what it looks like on the screen of the laptop used to drive the tank. It looks a bit like this:

The video is a screencast using the Skiblz Cam Chrome extension on my ARM Chromebook. It’s not the best video quality—the video feed from the tank is a little less jerky in real life—but the blur can be clearly seen, as well as the slow automatic brightness adjustment. Both of these make driving the tank in unfamiliar areas a slow and cautious process.

A future upgrade could try to resolve these problems by adding a better camera with a fish-eye lens, further back on the turret, so that the video feed would take in more of the tank’s surroundings.

Unfortunately the screencast doesn’t show the cursor position clicking on the nine control buttons, but it does show the bearing, pitch and roll readouts working, along with the laggy output from the ultrasound rangefinder.

If you’re wondering, in this video the tank is wandering around the offices of local web design company Adido, whose AdidoSrc “hack evenings” are the temporary home of the Dorset Constructorium hackerspace.

Stay tuned for some more Raspberry Tank development, including a Python port of the main program and web server code, and fixing the tank’s broken BB gun. In the mean time, I’ve also put online some photos of the quadcopter I’m working on!